Navigating change: a typology of student transition in higher education

Abstract

Student transition into higher education has increased in importance in recent times, with the growing trend in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations towards universal higher education provision and the concomitant widening of participation to include previously under-represented groups. However, ‘transition’ as a concept is largely employed uncritically in the field. In making these transition assumptions explicit, this article argues that there are three distinct accounts in the research literature, which inevitably lead to different approaches to transition policy, research and practice in higher education. While the third – transition as ‘becoming’ – offers the most theoretically sophisticated and student-sympathetic account, it is the least prevalent and least well understood. The article further argues that future research in the field needs to foreground students' lived realities and to broaden its theoretical and empirical base if students' capabilities to navigate change are to be fully understood and resourced.

Keywords:

• student transition
• widening participation
• social inclusion
• student equity

Acknowledgements

Financial support to undertake the study that informs this article was provided by an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grant.

Notes

Our reading of the research literature is that there is little difference between Colley's first and second categories, which are better grouped together, apart from references to ‘shifts in identity’ (Colley 2007, 429) in her second category, which we think are better located in her third. Colley's third category, then, is our second; her fourth, our third.

Strictly, Sellar and Gale (2011) refer to the capacities of mobility, aspiration and voice, although they also align these with Sen's capabilities.

Our reading of this relationship – between capability and capacity – is that while a person might be capable of transitioning within and through HE, his/her capacity to do so could be diminished or enhanced. That is, capacities invite within-capability comparisons.

Also see Colley (2007, 2010) on how time is differently conceived in and formative of transition types.